I think William Sitt's quotations are encouraging. Also we
should not forget the enormous effort that was put into the
implementation of the current Axiom library itself. This
library contains over 1,000 domains and categories that interact
in complex and apparently correct manner. This is a major
accomplishment and it's all written in SPAD. Although I said
earlier that Axiom's library covers only a small part of
mathematics, to be fair I should also point out that in scope,
if not always in depth, it covers much more mathematics than
either Maple, Mathematica or MuPad.
So in that respect the Axiom experiment in applying a strongly
typed programming language in computer algebra has not been
a failure. But there is the larger sense in which the medical
idiom: "The operation was a success but the patient died anyway
... " almost applies to Axiom. I think Axiom is in a critical
state. As open source software it can survive in this state
for a long time, but to advance in needs a lot more support.
It is quite disappointing to me that during that last two years
of fairly intense effort on our part, Axiom has not been
adopted by any major university program or research institute
and we are still struggling to find any kind of substantial
support. :(